


Myriad

by kaydeefalls



Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: M/M, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-06-17
Updated: 2003-06-17
Packaged: 2017-10-14 04:51:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/145565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaydeefalls/pseuds/kaydeefalls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wingfic...sorta. Elijah's always had an obsession with wings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Myriad

**Author's Note:**

> Um. Not quite wingfic (too grounded in reality). But not really normal either. Gimme a chance, folks.

**myriad** , _adj_. def: having innumerable aspects or elements

*

It started when Elijah was...nine? Ten? He couldn't have been older than ten. It was at the beginning of filming that awful movie, the one where he was the imaginary friend or guardian angel or something--what was it called? Ugh. He tries to block that one out of his memory. But that's when it started, anyway.

He had to wear all these ridiculous costumes. He didn't think they were cool, just babyish. After all, he was...nine? Ten? Too old for stupid dress-up games. Glitzy astronaut, glittery cowboy--fucking hideous, the lot of them. And dumb.

In the back of the wardrobe trailer, there was this...well, angel costume, for lack of a better description. But that brings to mind a boring white robe with cheesy cardboard wings dangling from the back, and that's not right at all. Although, to be honest, Elijah never really noticed the robe part, so maybe it was just boring and white. It didn't matter. All that mattered were the wings.

Not stupid cardboard cutouts. Real wings, lush and white and downy, with long, flowing feathers dusted with silver. They sprouted from the back of the costume, solid stems, all permanence and potential. Maybe they could even fly, like proper wings. Wouldn't that be something? Elijah could just picture himself soaring over the grime and glitter of Los Angeles, pumping his silver-dusted-white wings, vanishing into the sky, leaving a streak of white through the smog.

When he eagerly asked the costume designer when he would wear the wings, she laughed. "Oh, they're just left over from some grand scheme the director scrapped weeks ago. You're angelic enough without them," and pinched his cheek.

He was nine or ten years old, and he hated having his cheeks pinched. "Angels are stupid," he muttered, and slunk out of the trailer. Later, huddled in a shiny spaceboy outfit, sullenly waiting for his next scene, he thought about angels. He hated being called angelic. He didn't want to dress up as a stupid angel. He just wanted to fly.

 _That night, Elijah dreamed that he was flying. He pumped his silver-dusted-white wings and soared away from the movie set. His costars and directors and agent pointed and stared, yelling incomprehensibly after him. He laughed and twirled in midair, pushing himself to go harder, faster, until he left them all behind, wheeling over the Pacific Ocean. The wind whipped his short hair and tugged at his wings. But the farther he flew, the more the wind wreaked havoc on the wings, snatching feathers, ripping them apart. Panicking, he tried to turn back, but his wings were too weak and shredded to support him. They vanished completely, and he fell--_

Elijah never saw the wings again. But he began playing a little game with himself, just for fun. Whenever he met someone new--on a film, usually--he would imagine what sort of wings they would have. Long, flowing wings; short, flightless wings (like a chicken's); smooth grey feathers... the possibilities were as endless as personalities. Some people can have a lot in common, but Elijah had never met any two people whose wings were exactly alike.

Take Orlando. Orlando's wings were unique, in that no-fucking-way-can-ANYBODY-else-have-wings-like-these kind of way. They were huge and strong, tawny brown. They stretched out to a ridiculous span, and they were powerful as all hell. Orlando was one of very few people who really relied on their wings. They kept him afloat, kept him from breaking his back every time he jumped out of an airplane or off a bridge or into the waves, and had kept him alive and well that one time he DID break his back. Elijah sometimes thought Orlando could really fly, if he ever decided to give it a go.

 _Once, not long after filming in New Zealand began, Elijah dreamed that he and Orlando were going bungee jumping together. They stood at the edge of a bridge over a massive gorge, peering down at the rocks. It was a longer fall than any Elijah could remember having tried before. He swallowed hard and looked to Orlando for support._

 _Orlando grinned. "Take off your harness," he said. "You won't need it here."_

 _For some reason, Elijah believed him, and obeyed. When Orlando grabbed his hand and they jumped off the bridge, Elijah trusted that they would remain unharmed. His faith in Orlando seemed to be confirmed--their wings (which he hadn't noticed before but was sure they'd always had) caught them, slowed their descent. Orlando let go of his hand and soared, laughing and spiraling through the gorge. But Elijah's wings weren't strong enough on their own, and the wind whistling past his face tore them apart as he fell, and Orlando kept laughing and Elijah was all alone, falling--_

Of course, Orlando wasn't the only cast member with wings. They all had a pair, once Elijah had sized them up. Not that he thought about wings constantly, mind; it was just a trick of figuring people out, fitting everyone he met into a neat little box--er, pair of wings. Useful for getting to know a person, and all.

Sean, for example. Sean's wings were what Elijah imagined a mother hen's might look like, if the hen could also fly. Sort of elongated, and a bit stronger than you average chicken's wings. Elijah could just picture Sean flapping about in a concerned manner, hovering anxiously, then taking off to find assistance whenever he was needed. A mother hen that could fly was, in Elijah's opinion, a wonderful sort of person to have around. He liked Sean quite a bit.

Then there was Billy. Billy's wings were small and silky, more like...well, more like some bizarre brand of pixie than a bird. Elijah blushed when he thought about it, but it was accurate. Billy didn't so much fly as flit around, dart from one person to the next, bouncing off everyone else with his dry wit and random silliness. Everyone liked Billy. He was just that sort of person.

Which, of course, brought Elijah to Dom, and that's where he got stuck. It was the oddest thing. Dom was the only person Elijah couldn't assign wings to. Not for lack of trying--the first day they'd met, Elijah'd had Dom pegged with a bright red parrot's wings, loud and exuberant and flashy. But a few days later, he and Dom had been practicing fencing, and Dom's nimble, fluid movements paired with that mischievous grin just HAD to mean crow's wings, all speed and agility and just a hint of mockery underneath. And it didn't stop there. Every time Elijah saw Dom, his wings had changed again, shifting rapidly through every bird Elijah could think of and a few more besides, plus a dash of Billy's pixie and Sean's hen and Orli's oversized hawk.

Dom of the myriad wings. The ever-changing. It drove Elijah crazy.

One night, when they'd both had too much to drink, Elijah mentioned it. He half-sat, half-fell onto the couch cushion next to Dom. "Your wings," he said severely, "are schizophrenic."

Dom blinked at him. "My what?"

"Your wings," Elijah repeated. "See, everyone has them, only most people's stay the same, but yours don't. They change too much. I can't figure you out."

Leaning over carefully so as to maintain his balance, Dom removed the bottle from Elijah's hands. "I think you've had enough, Lij."

Elijah gave him the evil eye. "Look who's talking. Anyway, your wings need to stop changing."

"What do you want them to be?"

The question came out of nowhere. It caught Elijah off guard. "What do I...oh. I don't know." He leaned back against the cushions and frowned to himself. "I can't decide. Every time they change, I like that pair the best, better than everything that came before. So, like, your wings now are my favorite pair ever, I like them more than the pair you had in the trailer this afternoon, but I might like tomorrow's wings even more. Does that make sense?"

Dom just grinned. "What do my wings look like now?"

"Purple and dizzy," Elijah replied promptly.

"Um," Dom said. "I think you really HAVE had enough to drink."

"No, I'm serious," Elijah insisted. "They're sort of purple and sparkly, and they keep flopping around sort of hapiz...hapazer...haphazardly. Yeah." Elijah occasionally had trouble pronouncing words with more than two syllables when he was drunk.

"Whatever you say, Elijah."

Elijah caught Dom's arm before he could get up. "I really like this pair," he said reassuringly, and kissed him.

After a few startled seconds, Dom started kissing back.

About eight minutes later, Elijah was puking up all that alcohol into the toilet. He woke up the next morning with a wicked hangover and no memory of the night before. If Dom remembered the conversation or the kiss, he never mentioned it. And Elijah's dreams that night were muddled and confused, and he was never quite sure whether he was flying or falling at the end of them.

 _"I'm not going to jump," Elijah said stubbornly. "Last time I jumped, Orli let me fall."_

 _"I'm not Orli," Dom replied._

 _The waterfall loomed below them. They'd been filming near it all week, but Elijah had never gotten up the courage to paddle out there in one of the boats. Peter would never have let him, anyway. It was a fucking stupid idea. Yet here they were, him and Dom, paddling up the the edge of the falls, and Dom wanted to jump. It had to be a dream, of course. Things like this just didn't happen in real life. Elijah told him so. "This isn't really happening."_

 _Dom let out an exasperated sigh, flapping his ever-mutating wings impatiently. "Well, no, of course not, if you're going to be a baby about it." His voice sounded like every obnoxious director Elijah had ever worked with as a kid. He sounded like Josh Hartnett trying to pass him a cigarette. He sounded like that stupid Wardrobe lady who hadn't let him wear the wings._

 _"Fine," Elijah snapped, and jumped. The wind's screams (or were they Dom's?) echoed in his ears. He couldn't tell if he was flying or falling--_

Elijah thought that maybe the pressures of filming were getting to him. He slept all the time, but he never really felt rested. And the more exhausted he was, the more fixated on wings he became. What had been a vaguely diverting childhood game was becoming a full-blown, bonafide obsession. Everywhere he looked, he started seeing those fucking wings. In pubs, on the streets of Wellington, while shooting a highly charged scene with Sean Bean--they were everywhere.

It sometimes seemed like everyone could fly except him. They were all flitting about behind his back, floating around when he wasn't watching, laughing at him. And he was stuck here. To the earth. To the movie. To the pressure, the need to be better in every scene, the fear that if he even screwed up once...

Peter had called a twenty-minute break while the techies were trying to figure out where to put the Big Lights. The rest of the hobbits congregated, tossing stones around and joking, but Elijah slipped away from all that noise, to the river. He sat at the base of a tree, staring out at the waterfall. Two small, white birds danced together over the surface of the water, chasing each other, soaring. He heard footsteps behind him, but didn't turn.

"Whatcha thinking about, Lij?" It was Dom. Dom of the myriad wings, the ever-changing.

Elijah didn't even realize he spoke aloud. "If I had wings, what would they look like?"

A long silence answered him. The little white birds circled each other once more, twittering faintly, then took off into a grove of trees on the far side of the river.

"Wings?" Dom finally said. His voice was halfway between seriousness and laughter. "Gee, Lij, I'm not sure. Knowing you, they'd be long and flowing. White, maybe silver. Thick, downy feathers."

Elijah knew that Dom was just teasing him, but he looked up in surprise. His wings. His stupid angel wings.

Seeing the expression on Elijah's face, Dom's smirk faded. "You don't need wings to fly, Elijah," he said gently. He squeezed Elijah's shoulder and walked away, careful and clumsy in the oversized feet.

Elijah just gaped after him.

 _Days or weeks later, Elijah dreamed he was at the top of the waterfall. He picked his way carefully over the broad, damp stones, trying not to slip into the rushing water. When he had followed the rocks as far as they went--when he was standing at the very edge of the falls--he looked down at the rush and the pounding and the mist. He closed his eyes and let himself go._

 _His mad descent was slowed--caught--suspended, the mist of the churning water cool against his face. He floated for a moment, then began to pump his wings. Slowly, impossibly, he rose, hanging in air--a few more beats, and he was soaring. The waterfall faded into the distance behind him. The wind picked up, shrieking, and began to tear the feathers off his wings. Just like in his old nightmares. He was losing feathers, losing power, he was going to fall--_

 _But this time, he kept going. His feathers danced away on the wind until there were none left, and still he soared. His wings were gone, vanished, faded into the waterfall's mist, but he flew on._

 _Elijah laughed._

When he woke up, the dream left a soft, warm feeling in the pit of his stomach. It took a few moments to reorient himself, blinking the dream away, and a few seconds more to remember where he was and whose body he was wrapped so tightly around.

Dom of the myriad wings, the ever-changing, and memories of last night flooded Elijah, better than any stupid dream. He remembered what Dom told him, that afternoon at the river, and thought maybe it made some sort of sense.

Stupid wings, Elijah thought, and fell back asleep.


End file.
